Paul Meekin is a Chicago based writer, television producer, and movie critic for Streetwise Magazine.
He can found on twitter @MeekinOnMovies and facebook at www.facebook.com/MeekinOnMovies
He also stars and writes the hit web-based sketch comedy show, "FatMan and Little Girl" on Youtube Channel: ANTVGM64

The date movie. We’ve all been here. Be it a night out with your wife or hubby, a first date with someone you met online, or simply something you enjoy doing with your boyfriend or girlfriend, oftentimes seeing the right kind of movie can enhance your romantic endeavors for the evening, and seeing the wrong kind of movie can damn them completely. Some movies are romance neutral. I don’t think anyone seeing “Parker” is going to come out of that movie questioning the very fabric of their lives, for example. But, some are profound. In a series of articles highlighting the good date movies, the...

The pulpy, B-movie thriller Parker is a curious choice for Director Taylor Hackford. Hackford is probably most known as the man behind An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray, Everybody’s All American, The chilling Dolores Claiborne, and one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasure movies, The Devil’s Advocate. Those movies, while varying quite wildly in terms of quality and subject matter, are almost entirely focused on human (or non-human) interpersonal drama and conflict - which is something Hackford traditionally does well. Even in a rightfully maligned film like the aforementioned Devils Advoca...

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in pitch-rooms. Hearing people toss ideas back and forth for show ideas, spec scripts, the occasional web-series or sketch, eventually makes you realize that truly unique ideas are very difficult to find - and even harder to produce properly. It also makes you realize how many folks in the TV biz desperately want to be Aaron Sorkin.

Every couple of days someone would be turned onto the witty banter of The West Wing or Studio 60 or Sports Night and almost immediately pitch a show or concept that sounded curiously like something Sorkin would do. It’s like St...

I have a superstition that a studio's confidence in a film can often be determined by length of the movie's Wikipedia page. Young Adult's Wikipedia is about 800 words long if you subtract links and other website jibba jabba. The recent Muppets has about 5000 words. The reason for invoking this completely unscientific ponderment of mine is because I'm a big fan of Director Jason Reitman, so this short wiki, not a week out from the release, was a bit odd to me.

And now I know why. “Young Adult” is shallow and awful, and, ha ha, has all the depth of a young adult novel about vampires. Except ...

When the first Harold and Kumar came out in 2004, it was sort of a breath of fresh air from the Apatow comedies that were popular at the time. It was a road picture, it was irreverent, it was determined to make you laugh in any way it could. The manic energy of the two leads, and the fact the entire movie was about making it to a white-castle because your stoned, was the sort of silly concept that really captured the clouded imaginations of stoners everywhere.

The beauty of the Harold and Kumar films is the way in which they find their heart. In the first, their trip to White Castle was a ...

The gay love story occupies a curious place in the minds of populist cinema goers of late: Novelty. Throughout Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, the audience would snicker and laugh to one-another, just above their breath, at any sort of implication of romance between J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo Dicaprio) and his life-long, possibly fabulous companion, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Just a scant few years ago audiences were actively protesting “Brokeback Mountain” and now they’re giddy like school girls during a 5th grade game of Spin-the-bottle. I suppose that’s progress.

In Time, in the softest of science fictions, asks audiences to believe humans have somehow been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and that once you hit 25, the glowing green digital timer embedded into your arm starts counting down from one year. To live past that single year you must earn time by working for it, being given it, or engaging in ludicrous “fights” for it.

In this world time is used as money, so a cup of coffee is 4 minutes of your life, buying a fancy sports car would be a century, and so on. On paper, it sounds cool. However, there's zero thought given to any logi...

I left the screening of The Rum Diary feeling as if the pacific ocean itself had washed over me. There was a warmth in my belly, and this sort of slack smile on my face as I pondered what I would write about this film. My feelings are mixed. I'm wholly aware that as a film, with character arcs and a plot and a message, it sort of falls a bit flat. But as an experience, well, it's a different story.

The Rum Diary follows the many Caribbean adventures of Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp). Depp channels the snappish cadence and befuddled eyebrows of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasperformance, but di...

“Texas Killing Fields” is practical. It's effective. It hits the notes necessary. But in the end it's simply unsatisfying. “Texas Killing Fields” then, is like getting socks for Christmas. Or rather, it's like being disappointed by socks for Christmas.

On the surface, “Texas Killing Fields” is about two detectives, Mike (Sam Worthington) and Brian (Jeffery Dean Morgan) who solve murders in the depths of the rural Texas. Texas is a character in this film, make no doubt about it. The Texas presented in this movie is the kind of Texas that could find itself in a Jeff Foxworthy routine: Rust, ...

Grief is confounding in that, over time, it can hypnotize and make us do some rash and terrible things. We can lash out at the ones we love most, drown ourselves in vices like food and alcohol, or even choose to watch that terrible, terrible, Oliver Stone 9/11 movie. In the case of “Footloose”, a movie more about mourning and grief than it probably intended to be, the drunk-driving death of several teenagers has caused a small town to outlaw unsupervised “Lewd” dancing.

Things kick off some time after this, when Bahstonian Ren MahCormahhhck, moves to the biahble-belt south to live with his...